


Never Enough Release

by Kiarawolf



Category: Best Friends Forever (Webcomic)
Genre: M/M, bffcomic, tencent - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-09
Updated: 2015-04-09
Packaged: 2018-03-22 01:11:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3709397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiarawolf/pseuds/Kiarawolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After catching Vincent in a rather compromising position, Teddy’s behaviour becomes incredibly strange...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Enough Release

**Author's Note:**

> Massive thanks go to Becca of beccabear93.tumblr.com for her awesome beta work, which included "american-picking" haha. All faults remaining are my own :)
> 
> All characters belong to Mickey Quinn of goknights.tumblr.com  
> No profit is being made

Never Enough Release.

By Kiarawolf

09.04.2015

  The photos stare at him. He can only see them by the light of his computer screen, but it’s enough to make out the faces; one his own, the other that of his best friend.

  Friend. What kind of friend is he, laying here on his bed in the semi-dark, hand halfway down his pants, the video playing on his laptop unwatched – indeed, completely ignored – in favor of staring at those god-damned photos. Teddy is smiling in the closest one, a smile that reaches his eyes and also a place somewhere in Vincent’s gut, setting alight some rough longing that doesn’t belong anywhere within the circle of things a friend should be.

  Hooking up with Louis has made things worse and better at the same time. Better, because now his unchecked libido has found an outlet, but worse, because now that he’s actually had experience with another male, he can imagine all the better the way things might be with Teddy. Vincent seems to be stuck in a cycle of arousal and temporary relief; learning a thousand new ways for boys to be intimate with Louis, and then accidently imagining Teddy in such a situation, causing him to run back to Louis for some release… But when it comes time to hang out with Teddy again, anything from the way the smaller boy eats his cereal or picks up a shirt on the floor or even _yawns_ is enough to send him into another spiral of unwelcome thoughts and inconvenient needs.

  And guilt. What would Teddy say if he could see for even one moment into Vincent’s filthy mind? Just how disgusted would he be to find out that even something as unbearably platonic as driving home from school can cause Vincent to stare at Teddy’s fingers on the gear shaft and shift his knees in closer to his body? How disgusted would Teddy be if he could see Vincent right now, rutting into his own hand while seeking out Teddy’s face in the photos blu-tacked besides his bed?

  Vincent prefers not to think about Teddy’s realistic disgust at moments like this. Instead, he cruelly teases himself by imagining a fantasy; a Teddy who smiles back at him, who bites his lip and fiddles with the hem of his shirt, lifting it teasingly so that Vincent can see a small stretch of smooth brown skin there above the waistline of Teddy’s trousers…

  The pressure is building in the base of his stomach, a fire is being stoked franticly into great, unbearable heights. ‘Teddy…’ Vincent whimpers, and –

  He realizes that his door is open and the object of his fantasy is standing _right there_ , framed by the yellow light of the hall with his brown eyes as large as lakes and his soft cheeks as red as sunsets. ‘Sorry, um, I’ll just…’ Teddy mumbles, and the door is pulled shut again.

  _How much did he see?_ Vincent panics as he desperately pulls his pants up and slams his laptop shut. Did Teddy notice how Vincent’s longing gaze was latched onto those photos, rather than the laptop’s video? Did Teddy hear Vincent’s needy whisper? Did Teddy see the way Vincent’s body reacted to the sight of him, standing there so shocked and surprised in the doorway…?

  Vincent lurches himself off the bed and is halfway to the door before he realizes that he still needs to deal with the very conspicuous problem in his trousers. He tries to push it down with the heel of his hand, but that does little good. He tries to think of something to get him out of the mood; algebra, cleaning dishes, grocery shopping… but his mind wrenches him back to Teddy, Teddy who’s maybe seen it all, maybe seen nothing…

  Teddy, who, when he opens the door a few minutes later, is no-where to be found. Vincent attempts to call his cell, but the other boy fails to pick up.

  So he tries waiting, pacing nervously up and down his apartment’s short corridor. _Teddy must have seen something. Why else would he run? I’ve got to let him sort it out. Give him time._

  And yet he finds himself running to his car and driving through stoplights just to get to Teddy’s mansion without delay. At the grand entrance, he dials Teddy’s number for a second time – but gets only an overly long ring tone and a polite request for a voice message.

  Kennedy lets him in. ‘He’s in his room, said he wanted to be left alone,’ she tells Vincent. ‘You don’t know what that’s about, do you?’

‘I… Uh, well, he… I should probably just – ’ he steps around her and, with a half-apologetic smile, continues up the grand staircase to Teddy’s quarters.

  Outside, he hesitates. Teddy is obviously ignoring him, very clearly wants to be left alone… should he really disrespect that?

  _I’ll just explain myself,_ Vincent thinks, _I deserve to be able to explain myself_ _…_ _then I’ll leave._ Just what he’s planning on saying in said explanation, however, Vincent has no idea.

  Before he can convince himself to just go home, Teddy’s door opens. ‘I heard your voice in the hall,’ Teddy explains, stepping back and pulling the door with him so there will be space for Vincent to step through.

‘I… Uh…’ Vincent stammers.

  Teddy rolls his eyes. ‘Just come in, silly.’

  So he does. As he takes a seat on the bed, wiping his clammy palms down his jeans, he hears the door shut with a quiet click.

‘Teddy – ’ Vincent starts, looking up, but Teddy is walking barefoot across the carpet towards him, biting his lip and shaking his head as their eyes meet.

‘Don’t say anything, Vincent. I… Let’s just…’ He moves closer, close enough for Vincent to touch if he were to reach out… but Teddy’s the one who reaches, who moves his slender arm into the space between them and places his small hand on a part of Vincent that instantly feels as if it’s been set on fire.

‘Um, ah, Teddy?’ Vincent squirms, his eyes as wide and his nerves as stiff as if he’d just been electrocuted. His skin is crawling, his body seeming to want to jump and run and stay and freeze in equal parts.

  Teddy only makes those frantic nerves worse when he brings their mouths together in a gentle, barely-there kiss. Vincent’s heart feels upside down. His head feels like it’s wading through tar. He can’t help the moan that escapes him.

  Or the gasp that slips out as Teddy pushes him down onto the bed. Draped out with his back on the mattress and his toes brushing the floor, Vincent meets Teddy’s eyes. ‘Dude, what – ’

  Holding his gaze, Teddy climbs on top of him, straddling Vincent’s waist and arching his back as he leans down for another kiss. Vincent closes his eyes and breathes in peppermint. He whispers: ‘are you sure’ into the decreasing space between their mouths. Teddy’s only response is to move his hips, grinding himself against Vincent’s begging crotch, and after that Vincent gives up all hope of saying anything that makes sense. Instead, he turns to babbling in-between kisses, first chanting Teddy’s name, then swearing, sometimes simply appealing to God… seeking any way to release some of the roiling storm of emotion that is ballooning inside him. The storm builds with every downward thrust Teddy makes, every shiver of Teddy’s skin as he runs his hands over the smaller boy’s back, through his soft hair, along his thin shoulders… every exhale of Teddy’s breath that mingles, hot and quivering and hasty, in the space between their lips… every kiss those lips gift him with, soft but urgent, teeth and tongue and spit and –

  Vincent is crying out and shaking, making a mess in his pants as Teddy quivers above him, joining him for a final, drawn-out grind. Coming down from the pleasure, feeling like a feather falling through clouds, Vincent realizes his pants sound almost like sobs. He swallows hard. ‘I love you,’ he confesses, and nothing could keep back the goofy grin he wears as he says it.

  But Teddy is perhaps too still, perhaps too quiet. ‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ he finally says, rolling off Vincent without meeting his eyes. ‘I won’t be a moment.’

  Vincent hastily props himself up, trying to bite down his urge to reply. ‘Sure,’ he says, and knows that the casual tone he tried to put into the word hasn’t been conveyed in the slightest. He watches Teddy slide into his en-suite, watches him shut the door, and the storm inside him starts raining. Hard, heavy rain, a monsoon of water that, try as he might, he can’t keep inside. Out it comes, down his cheeks and over his bitten lip.

  But at least, once it’s all flooded out, the levels start to recede. As Vincent waits for Teddy to come out of the bathroom, his tears slowly dry into salty tracks down his face. The mess in his pants starts to become irritating. The silence from within the bathroom even more so.

  Eventually, he moves to the door. Taking a breath, he knocks lightly. ‘Teddy? Dude, you still in there? Are you okay?’

  The reply comes from somewhere deep in the room, and Vincent can easily hear the lie in Teddy’s put-on, presidential tone. ‘I’m perfectly fine, Vincent.’

‘Okay dude, uh… But we should really… um. Talk, you know?’

  There is a long pause before Teddy replies. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Vincent. In school.’

  Vincent closes his eyes and leans his forehead against the door. ‘Teddy… we can’t just… Listen, I... I never meant for – ah – _those_ words to fall out, and, well, I certainly don’t expect you to say it back. Please dude, just talk to me…’

  But there is nothing save silence in the bathroom. Vincent swallows, and waits, and counts down from ten, and then counts down from twenty. Finally, he makes a decision. ‘Okay then. That’s okay, Teddy. I’ll see you in school.’

  And he turns and walks away and it feels like he’s throwing aside a piece of his heart. Before he leaves the mansion entirely, he knocks on Kennedy’s door.

‘Sup?’ She asks, pausing her music and flicking to another tab on her computer.

‘Teddy… uh… could you just… check on him, in a little while?’

  She opens her mouth before visibly restraining her curiosity. ‘Sure, I can do that,’ she eventually says. Her eyes roam over him, taking in his mussed hair, rouged lips, and off-center clothes. He forces himself to walk away, but his legs are begging him to run.

  The next day at school, Teddy sits with the cheerleaders at break. Vincent watches their easy chatter and laughter from his seat at the footballer’s table. It’s not until after the bell that he manages to get Teddy alone; cornered beside the drinking fountain, Teddy fiddles with his sleeves and refuses to meet Vincent’s eyes.

‘We can’t not talk about this dude, not this time. Please, Teddy, throw me a line here. I didn’t even _sleep_ last night, I… Teddy, for God’s sake I’m going to go mad if you don’t just – ’ And Vincent stops because he realises his voice is getting a little too loud and passer-by’s are starting to look their way.

‘I… I…’ Teddy stutters, his lip trembling, eyes pleading.

  Vincent deflates, his rage leaving him instantly as his shoulders relax and his hands unclench. ‘It’s okay Teddy, you don’t have to… I’m sorry for trying to push you. Do you want to just forget it?’

  Teddy, still looking a bit uncertain, nods.

  Vincent tries to make his smile look reassuring. ‘It never happened, yeah?’ The words echo from another time, and Vincent wonders how many times he will have to say them. How many times his sanity will allow him to say them. ‘It never happened,’ he whispers again, if only to feel the twitch in his heart.

  Teddy swallows. ‘I’m sorry Vincent,’ he says, and dithers for a moment with his mouth half-open as though he might say something else… but in the end he only pulls his lips into a thin smile before slipping past and heading to his next class. Vincent watches him go and tries his best not to bite through his bottom lip.

‘It never happened,’ Vincent says again in the middle of the night, with the moonlight quivering across his guitar and thoughts of Teddy beating on the bars of the cage he’s put them in. ‘It never happened,’ he tells himself in the morning, when dreams of deft brown hands and sure soft lips have him arching and gasping and half-sobbing. ‘It never fucking happened,’ he chants as he finally gives in under the warm spray of the shower, gives in to the thoughts and the memories and strokes himself to shuddering completion. _It really, actually happened,_ he can’t help but think on Monday morning as Teddy climbs into his car and chats happily to him about the state of student council politics on the way to school.

  _It happened, it happened, it happened,_ he keeps on telling himself as their friendship slowly slips back into normalcy; as Teddy laughs and jokes and leans up against him as though everything is peaches and cream and perfectly platonic. As though he’s forgotten all about it. As though he doesn’t know completely well whom Vincent really likes – loves – when he asks about how things are with Kamri. As though he doesn’t know why Vincent is blushing when he puts a hand on Vincent’s arm. As though Vincent has just hallucinated every touch and kiss and whimper.

  _It happened right here,_ Vincent reminds himself as the pair settle in for a movie on Teddy’s bed. _We did all of those things_ _…_ _right here_.

  And he can feel the clouds banking up again, looming tall and black. _Not now_ , Vincent thinks, _please, not here._ But it’s precisely _because_ he’s here that he’s biting back the rain. Because sitting here next to Teddy with two inches between them is a painful remind of just last week, when they had been pushing themselves together, trying to remove any and all space, hands in hair and mouths pressing close.

‘Vincent…?’ Teddy asks, hesitantly, quietly, but Vincent can’t look at him. Can’t do much more than bite his lip and close his eyes, willing the rain-threatening clouds to go away even as they grow heavier and heavier.

  Teddy pauses the movie.

  Swallowing his storm, Vincent tries one of the put-on presidential smiles that Teddy seems so skilled at. ‘I’m fine,’ he says quickly, unsure how much he can trust his voice given the huge lump in his throat.

‘…No. You’re not.’

  Vincent shrugs. ‘It’s okay though, really.’

‘Vincent, I… I think you’re right. About what you said before. We can’t just ignore it.’

  Vincent shoots Teddy a questioning look, eyes peering out from around his fringe. ‘You want to… uh, talk about it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay, uh – ’ Vincent breaks himself off when he notices that Teddy is on the verge of saying more. ‘Do you want to go first, dude?’

  Teddy nods, and takes a deep breath. Pauses. Another breath. ‘I’m aromantic,’ he finally says.

‘Cool,’ Vincent smiles. ‘Um, that’s awesome, but what does that… what does it mean?’

  Teddy laughs, some of the tension in his shoulders loosening with Vincent’s unconditional acceptance. ‘It means I don’t experience romantic attraction.’

  Vincent finds himself frowning. ‘But… why’d you date Penelope?’

‘I thought maybe… if I tried a relationship, the feelings might grow…’

‘But they didn’t,’ Vincent concludes, remembering the answer Teddy had given him when asked if his split with Penelope had hurt.

‘Precisely.’

‘That’s okay dude, at least you figured it out, right?’

  For a while, they fall quiet. Vincent runs his hand through his hair, trying to figure out the guts of what Teddy’s really saying. ‘Teddy…’ he starts. ‘What does… I mean, why did you feel like you couldn’t tell me this?’

  Teddy immediately looks upset. ‘Because it means that I can’t give you what you want, Vincent. You have romantic feelings and I can’t, I… I…’

‘Hey,’ Vincent murmurs, putting his hand on Teddy’s shoulder, ‘it’s okay.’

  Teddy wrenches his arm away. ‘No, it’s _not_. When I realized, back in the summer, that you might like me in that way, I tried so hard to show you how silly that would be – you and me dating, that is – I mean there was one point where I actually _explained_ how badly we fit together, do you remember, that time on our double date? But you still… and then, when I saw you, um, in your room, last week, I thought… I thought that maybe it wasn’t romantic attraction after all, because you _do_ keep saying how well things are going with Kamri, so maybe that time you tried to kiss me was just… I mean, it’s plausible that you might have the same urges as I do, right? That you might feel sexual attraction, but not romantic? And I thought that if we kept it to that, then things would be okay… but then you… you said that you…’ Teddy trails off, looking panicked.

‘Teddy, hey, it’s okay. Really,’ Vincent promises as Teddy continues to shake his head and pick at the loose threads on his sweater, ‘it is. You know why? Because I meant it when I said that… that I’m in love with you. And that means that what I want is for you to be happy. If you want to forget all about this and just be friends, no worries, awesome, that’s great. If you want us to be more… to just mess around occasionally, nothing on top, or to – ah, um, be committed, or whatever, then I would want that. So whatever it is that you’re worried about, don’t worry. I’m cool with it, okay? I want what you want.’

  Teddy looks glum. ‘You say that, but…’

‘But nothing, dude. It’s true.’

‘I don’t think you understand, Vincent. I don’t want… I mean, going to dinner and sharing icecream and all that, it’s fine if it’s just an activity that we do, but if we were… I mean, if those things had a romantic coding? I wouldn’t… I… I…’ Teddy looks anxiously at his hands, which are picking apart the cuff of his sweater, pulling a loose thread further and further out.

  Vincent smiles. ‘Hey, it’s okay, dude, I wouldn’t, like, expect anything of you in that way… how about you take some time to figure yourself out? I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.’

‘…Okay,’ Teddy agrees, looking up with a relieved smile, ‘let’s finish the movie, then.’ And he shuffles himself a few inches closer to Vincent so that his head can rest on the taller boy’s shoulder.

  And one by one, Vincent feels all the storm clouds rolling away.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please let you know what you thought :) comment down here or send me an ask on kiarawolf.tumblr.com :)


End file.
